Above: Sunrise this morning at our campground in Las Cruces, New Mexico
We left New Mexico and drove through Arizona today. We have stopped in Yuma, Arizona, just 3 hours from home!
Finally: HOT weather again! It's sunny and 90 degrees. More long stretches of highway and desert until Tucson when the Saguaro cactus came back into view. I wrote about these and their sad shape back on day 1 of this trip. It appears these extremely slow growing cacti are rotting. (It can take 75 years for one of those "arms" to sprout!) I have not found out why they look so awful -- maybe bugs? I do know that night-time desert temperatures in this area have gone up 20 degrees in 20 years, and humidity has also increased 20%. All the roadways absorb the heat and release it slower at night than the desert does on its own. Hundreds of golf courses and thousands of swimming pools have affected the humidity.
The southern USA scenery has been fun to watch from the beaches of the Pacific, the rocky covered mountains in California, long stretches of highway in extreme dryness in deserts in Arizona, New Mexico & Texas, through the waterlogged bayous of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, to the Atlantic Ocean, and down to the tropics in the Florida Keys! ...and back again!
I can't wait to "produce" a slideshow of the photos! Come back later and check again!
ps reminder: the best way to view each photo is to "click" on it and it will become full screen. Then click the back arrow.
_______________________________________________________
Finally: HOT weather again! It's sunny and 90 degrees. More long stretches of highway and desert until Tucson when the Saguaro cactus came back into view. I wrote about these and their sad shape back on day 1 of this trip. It appears these extremely slow growing cacti are rotting. (It can take 75 years for one of those "arms" to sprout!) I have not found out why they look so awful -- maybe bugs? I do know that night-time desert temperatures in this area have gone up 20 degrees in 20 years, and humidity has also increased 20%. All the roadways absorb the heat and release it slower at night than the desert does on its own. Hundreds of golf courses and thousands of swimming pools have affected the humidity.
The southern USA scenery has been fun to watch from the beaches of the Pacific, the rocky covered mountains in California, long stretches of highway in extreme dryness in deserts in Arizona, New Mexico & Texas, through the waterlogged bayous of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, to the Atlantic Ocean, and down to the tropics in the Florida Keys! ...and back again!
I can't wait to "produce" a slideshow of the photos! Come back later and check again!
ps reminder: the best way to view each photo is to "click" on it and it will become full screen. Then click the back arrow.
_______________________________________________________
.JPG)
